None Shall Escape (1944)

April 7, 1944

THE SCREEN; At Loew's State

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: April 7, 1944

A trick way of drawing an indictment against Nazi brutality—or rather, against the brutality of one Nazi officer—is used to convenient advantage in Columbia's new film, "None Shall Escape," which is dishing out thick, dark gobs of anguish from the screen of Loew's State. The trick is to start with this one Nazi arrainged for post-war trial and then to recount in detailed flashback all the evidence of his crimes. It makes for another picture which says nothing about the Nazis that hasn't already been said, which is obvious in its piling on of odium but which does so with a grim, relentless will.

The Nazi in this case is a German who came to a Polish village after the last war to teach school and was kicked out for being arrogant and ravishing a village girl. So he goes back to Germany, joins the Nazis, rises with them to power and eventually returns to the village as Reich Commissioner after the Polish defeat. This time he vaunts himself outrageously and vents his neurotic spleen upon the villagers, whom he considers "idiots." But his stony heart is broken in the end when his nephew conceives an attachment for the Polish daughter of a woman he once loved.

Alexander Knox plays this satanic Nazi in a nervous, insinuating style which conveys a peculiar morbidity, and Marsha Hunt, Henry Travers and Frank Jacquet are middling as Polish villagers. There are moments, too, of genuine horror, as for instance when a group of Jews are slain. But the film is bombastically directed. It simply reiterates (without establishing) horrors. And, by drawing its hate to just one person, it condemns the specific but tends to let the general go.